This invention relates to a silent, visual metronome for use in assisting music students in developing skills of timing and rhythm; for use in assisting groups of vocalists and/or instrumentalists in co-ordinating non-uniformly developed timing and rhythmic abilities; and for use in assisting anyone seeking improved efficiency in coping with a situation which requires voluntary delivery of a muscular response at exactly the right moment.
As any musician is well aware, timing and rhythm are vital functions in the process of making music. Accordingly, as the multitude of muscular operations necessary to produce musical sounds are assimilated by a student as "technique", timing and rhythm must also be absorbed, if a performer is to bring music to life, for music is an art of timing and rhythm.
In its application to music, rhythm is the factor which determines the method in which the progressive movement of a tonal picture is conducted, its speed, its regular units of uniform time intervals (and each interval's "beat", or initial accent of a measure), its alternate relaxing and speeding up, its pauses, the entire machinery of the moving tonal picture.
The early acceptance of the conventional metronome by music teachers over the world suggests that skills of timing and rhythm may be as difficult for many to acquire as technical ability to play notes. However, there are users of a conventional metronome who would discount its utility value as an aid in acquiring those skills. Accordingly, the paragraphs to follow attempt to suggest that a device which marks the boundaries of successive intervals of time by sound does leave something to be desired by those who conscientiously seek to acquire skills of timing and rhythm.
It is essential that the user of a conventional metronome discriminate the time difference between the accented sound which the user intends to have fall on the first beat of each measure and the beat of the metronome. That perception serves the user as a guide in learning to make the necessary corrective adjustments of an on-going pattern of muscular movements. Essentially, the beat sound of a metronome serves to confirm whether the player is or is not meeting the beat. And these discriminations become increasingly difficult as the beat of the metronome and the user's accented sound approach unison. But discrimination is essential and its difficulty is unavoidable for anyone seeking these skills. Similarly, achievement in linking together groups of notes with their proper time values so that all fall within the boundary of two successive beats of a metronome depends upon the time-difference discrimination.
If one bears in mind that the metronome's sound occurs only at the instant a response is to be executed, it would seem safe to assume that a user's attention becomes concentrated upon identifying the occurrence of that particular sound. This is to suggest that the user is, in effect, rapidly and unwittingly seduced into a characteristic state of readiness for action. But, as everyone knows, such states readily disintegrate in muscular discharge when too prolonged, or when too rapidly mobilized to an optimal level. The consequent frustrations on failure to meet the beat, or to stay with it, will commonly arouse greater effort. But heightened levels of motivation generally have the effect of restricting one's flexibility of voluntary control over patterns of muscular responses. It is somewhat thuswise that a user of the conventional metronome struggles to achieve voluntary control of muscular patterns of response that get disintegrated by incommensurate states of readiness.
A closer view of this matter reveals the user is confronted with two inter-related difficulties: the timing of the first response to meet the beat, which depends upon a foreperiod interval of readiness to act; and, the difficulty of establishing even executions of rhythmic accents and subsequent weaker beats within the measure. It is to be noted that successful performance of this latter difficulty requires giving equal durations to notes of equal time value. A more complex difficulty of this sort is the precise ratioing of the time durations of notes of unequal values.
This difficulty of covering a unit interval of time with a certain number of discrete musical sounds may be suggested by describing a characteristic which we all share, investigated and identified by experimental psychologists and called Central Tendency.
Given the task of reproducing a standard length of line, or an interval of time, subjects perceived, or were informed of their deviations from the standard. The deviations of course were either an under or overestimate of the standard. Early in the trials subjects established a system of positive and negative errors. As the system developed with successive trials, an overestimate, for example, was less severely "corrected" by an under-estimate on the next trial. And accordingly, errors became smaller and smaller until their reproductions were closely accurate.
Since the earliest days of music teachers, many a conscientious teacher guided a pupil's hand according to the beat of the rhythm of the music played. The beat was lengthened at the long notes and shortened and quickened with the shorter notes. Thuswise all movement of the music was expressed by a similar movement of the hand. And as a consequence, students came to understand that rhythm is movement through time, regular and/or irregular, and to appreciate how it is that rhythm vitalizes an entire mass of sound.
It is one object of the present invention therefore to provide an improved metronome.